which languages to learn and why?

You laugh at people trying their best to communicate in a foreign language?

No, they don't.

When I was in Italy last month, one of the best bits was being able to have conversations in Italian.

I probably made plenty of mistakes, but the people I talked to were really lovely & didn’t laugh at me for them.

The 'Allo Allo reference is a good point (although the suggestion that people should laugh at people trying to speak a foreign language most certainly isn't ), in that there seems to be a reluctance often, on the part of us Brits, to bother to pronounce words properly. Somehow we seem to think it's enough to know (some) words, yet think that how we say them doesn't matter.

(And an approach that really wouldn't work if you were trying to speak Mandarin or any other tonal language!)

Exactly @JupiterJan and with modern technology so many people who are even severely or profoundly deaf don't use it as they have great oral language.

Why BSL in schools @SleepingStandingUp ? The number of people who use it is very tiny and there are so few BSL teachers that it's hard to find classes for the people who really want to learn it.

Thank you. I agree. Laughing at people and apologising for them is nasty. Did you have to learn English when you left Nice, @DiddlySquatted ? I bet you didn't always sound great.

This attitude is why so many English speakers are afraid to learn another language.

I'm fluent in French. I've heard people tell me they are too and they're not. It's not arrogance usually, it's a misunderstanding of what fluent means. I've also heard french people butchering English but I wouldn't laugh at them. I'd want to encourage them.

And no, actually, I don't find Allo Allo funny. But that's for all sorts of reasons.

I contemplated learning an "Indian" language as we're in such a diverse area but I a. Didn't think I had the ability b. Was overwhelmed by which would be best
Polish would be my second choice based on where I live.

BSL should be taught in schools.

Late back to this, but I'd go for Arabic over Dutch.
I've worked with Dutch people who live in the Netherlands and work there and you'd never know their English wasn't native.

I think it is because English is the main SECOND language in the world

English as a Foreign Language is the most widely learned though more people speak Chinese

To some extent, it really does not matter which language we learn. The Internet can give us opportunities to learn, practice and communicate in many different languages. I am finding the experience of language learning in a much more multi-modal world, very different from the experience of learning nearly fifty years ago.

It is also really interesting to learn something about how language is used in a particular culture e.g. in terms of greetings, terms of address, how prepositions are used, how pronouns are used, because learning this can show us slightly different ways of interpreting the social world.

For me, language learning is hard, simply because I have to make the time to do it. Yet yesterday, I managed to read most of a text that was at a level just above the level at which I am working. I felt a real sense of achievement.

Whilst there are many practical reasons for learning another language, the intrinsic and personal benefits also should not be underestimated.

@DiddlySquatted
I'm French and find you quite embarrassing

I work for a French company in London and I get it all the time. I have to apologise to French colleagues.

I think the important part in pp's post is the "pride themselves in". I met people who very arrogantly and with attitude announce "well of course I am fluent in x" and then it turns out they are intermediate at push. I don't laugh, I eyeroll though. Dh had "oh you speak x? I learned x it's not that hard for speakimg part!" with someone in his language. He just looked at me after and said it was just gibberish....
Luckily there are not that many around and absolute majority people are self aware about their language skills, not arrogant.

You didn’t find Ello Ello funny then ?. And there’s a big difference between foreign students struggling with English and people arrogantly boasting they speak a language when they can’t.

Mandarin and Hindi ?. You have unrealistic expectations unless you have a natural ability with languages.

I speak fluent French. My mother is from Nice and I lived there until I was in my early teens so it always makes me laugh when I hear English people, who pride themselves on their French, speaking like Arthur Bostrom from Ello Ello.

I am studying mandarin but I live in Asia and visit China often. It’s very difficult and no, I wouldn’t say that it’s necessary for someone living in the UK and not planning to travel or not needing to do business with Chinese people for example. It’s very time consuming. My husband is Indian and we live there for part of the year. I don’t think learning Hindi can be described as ‘necessary’ due to the fact that 1) English is one of the National languages of India and 2) in a lot of states (such as my husbands) they have their own language and don’t even speak Hindi but only communicate in their own language or English. I think people can learn a language should they wish to or should it be useful or necessary for them but it’s a big task and a lot of people just don’t have time. There’s no ‘should’ about it - it all depends on personal situations and preferences.

I’ve always had a brain that was wired for languages, so studied French and German to degree level, did Russian at GCSE, a couple of years of Latin at school, and cobbled together some Italian and Spanish for holidays. Because of that I can read many European languages well enough to get the gist without bunging them through DeepL. And I’ve found it useful professionally and personally because even where other people do speak English, they always appreciate an effort to speak their own language. It’s seen as good manners when so many UK and US English speakers are arrogant enough to assume they don’t need to bother.

I use both French and German for work, and it has definitely given me opportunities I wouldn’t have had without this fluency.

I started learning Japanese for work, because I was working for a Japanese company and most of the team out there don’t speak English. Turns out that’s not so uncommon in Japan, where the statistics on English speaking are very different to those in Europe and other parts of the world. Even as someone who is a natural at languages, Japanese is so very different to European languages that it even puts learning 48 adjective endings for Russian into perspective. Learning Cyrillic was a lot easier than picking up both hiragana and katakana, alongside kanji.

I’m not sure it’s as useful to learn Mandarin or Hindi as it is to learn a language you can commit to and learn for the love of it, knowing you’ll have the opportunity to speak it and maintain it. Especially if languages aren’t really your thing. I look at my husband, who relies on me whenever we’re abroad, and my son, who takes after his dad on languages, and I think either of them could learn maybe one other language well if they had the chance to use it regularly in everyday life, but not otherwise. Hindi and Mandarin would likely be beyond them, but a European language that they might get to use? Still better than no language learning at all.

I have a long way to go before I’ll have mastered Japanese, but I will keep going with it. In my fifties now, so not sure whether I’ll be adding any other languages to the repertoire, or just deepening my knowledge of other European languages. I’m tempted by Mandarin, Arabic and Korean, but I want to get better at Japanese before muddying the waters with another one. At least with Mandarin, I have the crossover of kanji from Japanese, so there is some knowledge I can reuse.

Finally, as far as apps are concerned, I use Busuu rather than DuoLingo, because it goes deeper into the grammar, and I still find that essential for learning a language versus parroting a few phrases. I find it a good support alongside the lessons I do with my Japanese teacher because it’s more up to date on vocabulary than the traditional Minna No Nihongo textbook. But I have also found watching Japanese TikTokers on lives has been a good way of getting my ear in. So
many more tools available to help these days :)

@BrakeLights - you can see on my previous message, I do live and work in a German speaking country, and very very few people here speak English. I couldn’t live here without Speaking German. Maybe city is different but it’s about 5% of people locally who speak English.

That's a very outdated view. China and India are much bigger markets and you are more likely to encounter them professionally (including in the UK) than someone German or Spanish speaking. However, though I'm not sure about Mandarin most Indians that you'll meet in a business related function will be able to speak English. It's the same with German. Most Germans speak fluent English so unless you plan on living in Germany I don't think it's that useful. Spanish would be more useful.

I'm a native German speaker, living in the UK, and apart from speaking to family I almost never get an opportunity to speak German neither socially nor professionally. I can think of lots of instances though very Hindi or mandarin would have come in useful, again both professionally and in informal settings though it also depends on your field of course.

@magicmole retiring to France is when my degree will at long last become worthwhile, I hope 😄

I speak 4 European languages and would recommend Spanish if you'd like to feel you're making progress quickly. Of the four, I found it relatively easy to reach a pretty good conversational level. I also love the language and in my experience found that people in Spain are very encouraging of your attempts to speak their language. It's so useful too if you have plans to travel to South America. Loads of online material available at various levels also. I'm afraid I can't comment from a career perspective as that wasn't relevant for me.